Incandescence
by InTheShadowOfSignificance
Summary: A collection of drabbles relating to the characters of Samurai Champloo. Chapter 9: The most harrowing truths are those we never dared to speak.
1. Daggers

**Disclaimer: **I do not own SC, nor do I claim rights to any of the affiliated characters.

**Warnings/Notes: **A series of drabbles on the characters of Samurai Champloo. _Please Note:_ Any themes that may be construed as sensitive of offensive will be mentioned in this section at the beginning of the chapter. This story's rating is set for the sake of future installments, thank you.

* * *

She lives life in small, insignificant details. In dark, skeletal faces with eroded noses and eyes that have rotted out.

She indulges silly whims to drown out the lingering floral scent of a summer that had been channeling tragedy, all along.

She carries a small, straying animal atop her shoulder from time to time, because its voice is tiny and shrill, and reminds her of long-gone laughter.

At her side, she keeps two men.

One is a calm, and soldiers on without complaint, born in benevolence and raised by duty.

The other is wild, and tears through streets with an overwhelming ego, enabled by a willingness to endure.

Despite their striking impact on her character, she supposes that they too, started out as just another whim to mask the hurt of a far-off summer.

Yet, she sees now, that the calm man prepares her, with the smooth, even voice of a father she can distantly remember.

And perhaps the wild one keeps her nerve, because the only thing more instrumental than reaching Nagasaki, is facing now, what she could not then.

There is purpose in everything she keeps. In the token of the protector she should have had as a small child, and in the living, breathing proof that one can fuel survival with spite, which she hopes can buy a man.

_She lives life in a small skeleton whose nose has eroded, and whose eyes have rotted out. _

_

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**AN: **A huge thank you for everyone who has read this.


	2. Regrets

**Disclaimer:** I do not own SC, nor do I claim rights to any of the affiliated characters.

**Warnings/Notes**: A series of drabbles on the characters of Samurai Champloo

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The night she ate only one bowl of rice the two men slept in shifts. When her face burned red with fever they wrung out cool clothes until their hands were raw from the process, wondering how they had missed the onset of such an illness.

Mugen was rough with her, slapping fabric to her forehead and masking worry with annoyance. Jin was careful and contemplative, checking for further symptoms as she slept.

The following evening, around a campfire, the samurai posed one question, "What shall we do?"

Mugen shrugged it off, because he too realized that their plans had changed entirely. All that mattered was taking care of Fuu, and he realized, much to his own dismay, that he _may _not be as interested in killing Jin anymore, if their goals had become so similar.

-x-

As the three neared Nagasaki a full week after Fuu's recovery, the two men, gathered with her around a campfire, came to one final consensus. They agreed to share their pasts, and in the end, Mugen's only regret is that Jin is the one bold enough to make such an agreement in exchange for the knowledge of how Fuu's mother died.

* * *

_Some say it's a saviour_  
_In these hard and desperate times._  
_It helps me to forget_  
_That we're just born to die._

_And I know nothing good comes easy_  
_And all good things take some time_  
_I made my bed, I'll lie in it,_  
_To die in it's the crime._

**AN:** A huge thank you to everyone who has read this.


	3. Secrets

**Disclaimer:** I do not own SC, nor do I claim rights to any of the affiliated characters.

**Warnings/Notes**: A series of drabbles on the characters of Samurai Champloo

* * *

Throughout the journey they plague her with questions. _Who is he_, they ask, _what does he look like? _

For the most part their prodding is bearable, even understandable. The entirety of their wandering has been just that, walking on whims, on any little lead they can forage among strangers. While she is content with these fragmented hopes, her male companions crave a more tangible goal...some small, fleeting embodiment of their aggressor.

Though the two are very different, neither Mugen nor Jin are the kind of people to enable someone else's fantasy, even if it _is_ in the name of revenge. They are men of action, and she knows their skepticism as well as they do. In truth she knows their way of thinking will never be her own. Questions, to them, mean the possibility of making this _real_. The only compensation they know to take for what is likely a fairytale is the demand for traces of reality in a dream.

Fuu does the best she can to provide answers, but there are some questions that break her will without touching her tongue.

_Where are we going?_

To the impasse of life and death. To the impossible divide between what was, and what will never be again. To the bastard who brought the end of her childhood, the end of her beloved mother. It is not _where_ they are going, it is _who_ they are getting to.

Fuu does not remember the man's face, if she dreams vividly about the day he left, she is lucky to remember his voice. While the two men who accompany her are desperate to follow an entity, she is chasing a feeling back to a place that robbed her of her innocence.

The idea, just the _idea_ of where they are going is so painful she can barely fathom it. In the end she does not know if Nagasaki is the answer anymore than Edo had been, she only knows that to keep the men from straying their destination must have a name.

As they near the new city, she is feeling impossibly vulnerable, in the night Jin rests a hand on her shoulder...and she almost tells him everything. But, (stupidly, she can't help but think) he says, "Perhaps, I should..." And she loses her nerve.

Because whether Nagasaki is the right place or the wrong place, she cannot handle the thought of being alone again.

Some secrets, she decides, are worth keeping.

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A little food for thought. Thank you for reading.


	4. Victories

Disclaimer: I own no copyrighted material, as usual.

Warnings/Notes: Not my best but I figured what the hell, at least it's something.

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He had wasted all his time until their journey's end trying to bury shame. At first, every kill that became necessary was thought to purge the memory of his first murder. He danced with swords in the hope that putting enough distance between blade and blood would cleanse him of haunting memories. He would not kill for killing's sake, but he had never hesitated to end a life. Somewhere deep down he was counting the bodies, as unfathomable as it had been to recall his first kill was _master, _it was perhaps more unthinkable to pin Mugen as his last.

The younger was a shameless façade, covering scars with satire to strengthen a cryptic resolve. And Jin became acutely aware that there was no reason to kill someone who was more of a child than the female companion some four or five years their junior.

The only thing he had seen of greater magnitude than death was motive. People died in self-defense, in mercy, in loyalty. Sometimes, Jin knew, people died just _because_. But he would not be one to add to the pile of carnage atop which that flag flew. He had spent his entire life bearing the burden of one indecency, he refused to endeavor another because Mugen willed it.

When the time came he knew there would be no victor in the final fling of their swords. It was because Jin felt strangely determined to die with meaning, that he indulged the younger's whim of fighting for the sake of a challenge: as if the opponent's life was just part of a game.

And when he rose, aching, and dazed, and alive, he stood at the crossroads as Mugen's equal. Motives aside, he realized that bonds between two people meant abandoning thoughts of killing one another. His master had not cared enough for him to cast aside thoughts of killing for self-preservation, but Mugen valued him, in whatever way, enough to set aside the only need he had ever had – killing time with battles.

No matter how shameless the opponent – their draw is his greatest victory.


	5. Birds

Disclaimer: I own no copyrighted material, as usual.

Warnings/Notes: Something about this show entices every ounce of sentimentality and nostalgia in me; maybe I'm not alone in that respect.

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The town does not have a name. (Neither do the faces.)

She pushes through a crowd of phantoms to the field she's slept in for the past three days. As the sun sinks lower on the horizon, she traces lines of orange and maroon until they meet the remaining notes of blue.

It has been eight months to the day since their separation, she has traveled, she guesses (and probably exaggerates) hundreds of miles. She does not belong here anymore than she belongs three towns over, an ocean away.

She stays, not for the food, which is passable at best, nor for the job, which pays little and is very demanding, but for the birds that perch triumphantly in the few trees the area offers passersby. They are unlike any she has seen before. Broad and stark black, save for the chest which is an odd, rusting red she recognizes in the same man she laments when she is by herself.

Soon she knows they will migrate and there will be no glimpses of the glorious, forbidden color as she's wiping dishes or fighting sleep. She guesses she'll move on when they do, because chasing them is as good as chasing anything, isn't it?

* * *

"You wouldn't happen to know what they're called, would you young lady?"

Her boss, an aged man who walks unsteadily even with a cane, has asked why she must leave. 'to be where the birds are.' She replies with her small, blushing smile. And he smiles back, because she is young and he remembers being young, too.

"Just what I call them." She answers nonchalantly.

"Oh? What's that."

She does not reply, merely turns and hurries off into the distance. "Damn it." She stops for breath, hand reaching out for rough bark to steady her trembling legs, "You've gotta make everything harder for me don't you-" She chews her bottom lip to fight back tears she did not know were coming, attention suddenly diverted to a shadow in the upper branches, gleaming red and black, "...Mugen."


	6. Innocence

Disclaimer: I do not own SC, nor do I claim rights to any of the affiliated characters.

Warnings/Notes: Recounts bodily injury in somewhat graphic detail, rating 'T' should be safe, but be warned.

* * *

_It's funny, the things we steal from people._

* * *

When he was a young boy he watched as a woman was drug away from her home, just a form, and maybe not even a body anymore. She flailed against her aggressors in the way a fish fights for its freedom outside of water – spastic - disoriented but alive.

She sunk her teeth into the officer's hand and managed to crawl a few inches toward the shithole she called a hut, beyond which her infant lay shrieking inside. The tall phantom at her back brought the end of his gun down hard against her skull, and laughed as her body fell, convulsing, to the dirt.

As a sort of display to those who had gathered in the streets, drawn to the spectacle by fear, or malice, or outrage, the officer jerked a coiled whip from a younger man who had come to stand guard. He beat the soles of her feet until the writhing in her body stopped, until her moans (the only sound she could muster as she bled into her brain) died on her lips, and bystanders drug themselves away to empty their stomachs.

In the evening he walked to her body and touched the blood of her flayed feet. Drug it into her home on his own skin to gather her baby in his arms. Left it drying on the grass of the river bank. Left its remnants to be swallowed by the current which took daughter home to mother.

* * *

Fuu is awake, and so is Jin, speaking in hushed whispers by the riverside. His eyes are open, his ears straining to make out their words as the samurai places a hand on her shoulder. The water running over the rocks is mocking him, he thinks.


	7. Choices

Disclaimer: As always, I do not own Samurai Champloo, nor do I claim rights to any of the affiliated characters.

Warnings/Notes: An ode to Shino's marriage.

**Choices**

* * *

I painted it on sharp-tongue canvas between pursed lips,  
and cut it out – wretched open and bleeding – because I was not bold enough to speak it.  
I left it in the fold of my kimono.

Because (in this moment) I am tired of vacant hands always reaching, never finding,  
of broken promises, swollen and ugly, left to fester among lies.

I wrote it out like numbers in a row,  
sacrificing purpose for consistency I could never be happy with.  
Some things are just that black and white.

I could clothe the truth in gold, carried on the scent of sunflowers,  
or seal it in an envelope of lingering musk:  
In the end, all the signs are in your handwriting:  
flashing neon lights that scream we are never going to fix this.


	8. Nothings

**Nothings**

* * *

Disclaimer: I do not own Samurai Champloo, nor do I claim rights to any of the affiliated characters.

Warnings/Notes: Snippets of Jin, Fuu, and what could have been.

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_"How could you do this? You promised!"_

_"Forgive me."_

* * *

She is kneeling by the river, sniffling softly and wringing her hands against her kimono. He can hear the rustling of fabric from several feet away. Wordlessly he advances, watching her body grow rigid at his sudden intrusion.

"Forgive me." His thoughts are heavier than his tired body.

"No." She laughs to disguise the pain, swiping at her running nose with her sleeve, "don't be silly."

For a moment the world is dizzyingly still, water running over the rocks a harsh invasion of his ears, which are straining to make out the little noises in her throat as she tries to swallow. "Perhaps I should…"

"No." She says quickly, "if you did, that jerk Mugen would…" She stops, but does not meet the elder's eyes, because she is lying. Because she is too meek to be truthful and say what she feels, which is whorish and ugly and _jealous_, because somewhere there is a woman stepping off a boat, waiting for Jin.

He rests a hand on her shoulder in comfort, as if to reach out to her, but she is jilted and insecure. She cannot measure up in maturity or physique to the elder he almost abandoned her for. Things happen for a reason, she tells herself, it is meant to be this way.

_They are meant to part ways._

* * *

He returns to her, a savior clothed in vulnerability and guilt. There is no armor glistening in the sun, there is no white horse to carry her away to safety. There is only the ugly truth of an assassin and the body between his sword and her.

"Jin!"

She calls his name more times in the next few weeks than she can remember calling anyone's. On the afternoon he later awakes, she lets the ugly truth come seeping through her veins, onto her tongue, across her lips, "It's stupid." She says to his sleeping body, which she prays everyday will not soon become a corpse, "I just wanted…to matter."

He lays awake for hours in the shack before he has the courage to emerge, silent. Contemplating.

* * *

"Catch you later."

Even as she calls this over her slender shoulder, deep down he knows he will never see her again. And he wonders if, just this once, he should listen to the impulsiveness urging him to turn back to her. He pauses for a moment and listens to her footsteps follow the dirt, setting his gaze on the ground. The boat pushes away from the dock, into the sea mist, and she is clothed in pink regret against the setting sun. He sets his own feet to keep from stumbling, to keep from finally making a move, because it would be selfish to do so now, once she's moved on from all this.

Her form is dissolving into the horizon when he finally braves a glance. Things happen for a reason, he tells himself, he is meant to let her go, just like Shino.

_They are meant to part ways._

Chuckling softly he straightens himself and heads off into dusk.

[No more fantasies and facades.]

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AN: Because I am a Jin / Fuu Fan deep down, because things have always been messy and muddled between them, and because the series is so damn nostalgic. Ugh... Anyway, thank you for reading.


	9. Goodbyes

Disclaimer: I do not own Samurai Champloo.

Warnings/Notes: Musings that probably make very little sense.

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**Goodbyes**

* * *

He was trained in the art of the dying, in the shudder of a man's eyes as he moves in for the kill. From the time he could hold a sword, he could tell when it was caressing the current of wind to end an enemy's life, or less commonly, the user's.

It was natural that he noticed the hesitation in her body. The way her shoulders rose and fell as she chewed on her thoughts, working up the nerve to tell the story their journey had been founded on.

It began hurriedly, in a rush of adrenaline he only knew to compare to the first clash of his weapon against another. Soon enough, it evolved into tragedy that had ebbed from his veins as a child, pushing away and ahead until he could seldom discern himself from it.

He lived his life in dying secrets…Fuu's began from the moment "mother" left her lips, and did not fade, he lamented, with the close of her tale. This time, the voice that trembled as it spoke "the samurai who smells of sunflowers" was not moved by anger, but hurt, was not accentuated with conviction, but turmoil.

_Anguish._

Something in his heart stirred as he pressed a hand to her shoulder.

"Can you still go through with it?"

"What do you mean?"

Her mouth curved downward once the words had left it, her eyes darting around the dark space to find a focal point far enough from her companion's eyes. He crouched behind her, silently demanding her attention without really needing it. Her mother's illness had been strangely vague for something that consumed the first half of her life, and her father's disappearance described in similar lack of detail for demanding the bulk of her later years.

Her fists and lips tightened as she forced a sob to the back of her throat, "Forgive me."

The words he needed her to say could not compare to the ones that hung in the silence her crying left him with.


End file.
